The Want Ads
There are a number of roles required in implementing EJBs. These
roles are summarized below.
- Bean Providers make the beans that can be assembled into a complete application. These can either be internal employees, or external companies that sell or lease their EJBs.
- Application Assemblers are the architects of the entire system. They put the entire application together, and act as the consumer for the beans that are provided. They may write lightweight intermediaries that make the beans work together.
- EJB Deployers handle the tasks of bringing the application into production. This includes managing hardware and firewall issues.
- System Administrators manage and support the application once it is running.
- Container and Service Providers supplies the EJB Container, or application server. Container and server providers are companies like Oracle, Orion, BEA, IBM, and JBoss
- Tool Vendors supply developers with software to build their EJB applications. Often the container and service providers also act as tool vendors. Many providers offer an IDE that is optimized for their EJB Container. Though EJBs are portable among EJB containers, the IDE can lock their customers in to the corresponding EJB container.
- The actual size of the project and company dictates the number of people who actually work on an EJB implementation. At my company, for example, the first three roles were handled by one person, and the system administrator by someone else. We used one vendor for the last two roles. With the growth of the company, we now have three people filling the first three roles, but each person is responsible for each of the three roles. Larger companies may have entire departments focused on one role alone.